Go to a New Hampshire college for a summer prep program, only to find out your dorm was an old psychiatric hospital. Needless to say, you won’t be having a peaceful summer. In Madeleine Roux’s new book, Asylum, this is teenager Dan Crawford’s experience when he arrives for a program for gifted students. An outsider at his school, he sees this trip as a chance to be with like-minded students and finally have some friends. But his stay starts out as anything but ordinary when he finds a disturbing photograph in his dorm room upon check-in. Soon, he and two friends discover old patient records, medical instruments and more ominous photographs in the old warden’s office and in a series of hidden rooms, all of which hint at horrific treatment of patients and human experiments gone awry. To make matters worse, Dan begins having nightmares about the old place, receives strange emails and discovers some chilling connections between the history of the asylum and his and his friends’ present-day lives.

Staying away from anything too mind-bending or fantastical, Roux creates a good old-fashioned scarefest of a story, one where you’re holding your breath as the characters open up the next door or descend yet another flight of stairs. The suspenseful nature of the book and the well-developed characters will appeal to both readers of realistic fiction and horror/suspense. Similar to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Roux’s tale adds to the unsettling ambiance of the story by incorporating photographs from real asylums. Roux has left plenty of loose ends and unanswered questions for another book, which is due out later this year.